Sharon Zardetto Aker, RIP
Sharon started writing professionally about the Macintosh at its inception in 1984, with articles in the earliest issues of Macworld and the premiere issue of MacUser. She contributed to The Macintosh Bible for its second edition in 1989, served as the lead author/editor for the third edition in 1991, and reprised that role for the 1,000-page seventh edition in 1998. In between, she also wrote The Macintosh Companion: The Basics and Beyond, collaborated on two editions of The PowerBook Companion with her husband Rich Wolfson, edited The Macintosh Dictionary, and penned The Mac Almanac. Throughout the 2000s, she continued as a columnist for Mac magazines, ultimately writing nearly a thousand articles, including one in the final print issue of Macworld.
Although mentions of Sharon in TidBITS date back to when I first read The PowerBook Companion (see “Travels with Charley,” 16 November 1992), we began working together around 2006, when she wrote Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X and its companion volume, Take Control of Font Problems in Mac OS X. She thrived as a Take Control author, writing books about Safari, iBooks, and Numbers, and contributing TidBITS articles on similar topics.
[…]
I’ve never met anyone as insatiably curious and communicative about software as Sharon. She didn’t just want to know how an app worked; she wanted to tell everyone about it. She couldn’t open an app without poking at every menu and every button, and then asking, “What happens if you hold down the Option key while…?” Sharon never met a keyboard shortcut she didn’t like, and she lived to unearth those that didn’t reveal themselves in the interface or the app’s manual.
Previously:
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The Macintosh Bibles were some of the most amazing books I've ever read. It's bonkers to think that you could put pretty much everything you wanted to know about a computer, including a list of relevant apps, into a single 1000-page tome. You want to know about relational databases? It's in the book. You want to learn about the ergonomics of using a computer and how to avoid RSI? You can. You want to know what fonts are? Also in the book. You're wondering how to read the NYT on the Internet? Yep, also in there.
These books are on archive.org, by the way:
https://archive.org/details/mac_The_Macintosh_Bible_6th_Edition_1996/page/n331/mode/2up
Very sad news. My first contact with her writing was an assignment by Macworld Italia to translate a couple of Sharon's articles into Italian (can't remember which ones, this happened about 20 years ago), and it was such a pleasure to read her that I kept looking for more. I had no idea of her health issues. May she rest in peace.
